Reflections on Reading: What is our goal? What influences students?

By Kim Miklusak

Often we hear people bemoan a perceived or real decrease in sustained reading in our students.  Teachers express frustration that students don't read outside of class or are not reading at a level that teachers feel they should be at.

This year our Senior English students were doing independent reading choices for 20-60 minutes a week in class, and I know more classes have added this across all grades.  So as the Senior English teachers prepared for our Independent Reading Book Circles, I asked my students to do a brief journal entry on successes and barriers when it came to their reading.

In the words of Paulo Freire in Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach, he says, "As a practical-theoretical context, the school cannot ignore the knowledge about what happens in the concrete contexts of its students and their families.  How can we understand students' difficulties during the process of becoming literate without knowing what happens in their experiences at home or how much contact they have with written words in their sociocultural context?"

I want to share some of their responses here.  They certainly caused me to step back and reflect as we set our goals and targets for our unit: was our goal a quiz at the end?  Was our goal just to finish a book?  Was our goal to inspire a love of reading?  In the end our goal was to have sustained dialogue about a reading both within one book circle and across books.

Using Metacognitive Strategies to Increase Student Reading Engagement

By Jackie Figliulo 

Whether asking students to engage with class-assigned texts or books of their choosing during independent reading, I’ve always struggled to get students interested in being readers.  And why should they be interested?  Because-the-teacher-said-so works for very few students.  Then when a text challenges students, its subject matter is “boring,” or their cell phones are mere inches from their itching finger tips, because-the-teacher-said-so just simply won’t cut it.  

Enter metacognitive strategies.

Telling students to think about their thinking piques their interest as we start our class each year.  Showing them that we all approach and experience a variety of texts in our own way allows them to understand there is no one way to be a reader and a thinker. Showing students it’s ok to not know everything and to ask questions is a valuable part of being a reader.  Promoting metacognitive strategies in class also tells students that their individual experiences matter and are valuable.  
     

In my English classes, I most intentionally employ metacognitive strategies during independent reading.  Students bring a book of their choosing to class on Fridays and are instructed to read for a given amount of time (25 minutes in quarter one, 30 minutes in quarter two, etc).  Once they’ve read, they complete a metacognitive reflection, answering five out of seven questions that applied to their reading experience that day.  Each quarter we make improvements to the reflection sheets so that students can use them in ways that make most sense to them as critical thinkers.

Now, how can I assess students’ thinking and reflections in a meaningful way? The metacognitive conversation.  

Each quarter, I return the students’ reading reflections all at once.  They get to look through their reading experiences from the last ten weeks and reflect on their progress, problems, and evolving thinking.  Using their own reflections as evidence, students prepare for our summative assessment:  the metacognitive conversation.  

Students must prepare for the metacognitive conversation by answering six to seven questions about their reading for the quarter.  They must reflect on what they did throughout the quarter and then set goals or propose solutions to their reading road blocks for the following quarter.  The day before our formal conversation, we review the procedure, expectations, and evaluation [see assignment sheet], then choose two student facilitators to guide the discussion the next day.  In order to participate, students must have their reflections and admittance slip (completed questions).  During the conversation, students discuss their thinking, approaches to the text, problems they encountered, and make recommendations to each other about text choices or methods.  At the close of the conversation, students complete a self assessment of their performance during the discussion.  Their reading reflections, admittance slips, self assessments, and my notes make up their final grades.  
The metacognitive conversation is a valuable, focused evaluation of one of my overarching quarter learning targets: students will be critical thinkers of texts and their own thinking.  It allows students of all reading levels to show growth and be measured on their own personal progress.

Another benefit of using metacognitive strategies and this method of assessment is the community it builds in our classroom.  I come to know how my students think as individuals and can use that to inform and differentiate my instruction.  Additionally, students get the chance to relate to one another as academics, not just as peers sharing the same space each day.  

I continue to struggle with intentionally embedding metacognitive strategies in all parts of our curriculum.  I hope to create a classroom where individual, critical thinking becomes the class norm, not just something we do on certain days.  However, the metacognitive conversation days give me hope that my students and I are at least on our way!

Please feel free to come observe a metacognitive conversation at the end of May (exact date, TBD) periods 2, 3, 6, 7, 8! :)

Blending Reading and Writing to Understand the Content

By Mark Heintz

This semester I put more emphasis on students reading to gain an understanding of the content and writing to prove their understanding of the readings and content.  Throughout the semester, I shifted my teaching style to center on students reading and writing daily.  This shift came my students giving me feedback and their writing and my own reflection on the time it takes to develop the skills of academic writing and understanding of primary and secondary sources.  Since the shift, the amount of daily feedback each student received on their progress towards these skills has increased and their understanding of the content increased.

For the past week lessons, the following were my content objectives:

• List five ways rulers continued to use religious ideas to legitimize their rule. 

• List three supporting details that explain how the Spanish, Dutch, French, and British empires rose in both hemispheres.  

• List supporting details that explain how the Manchu, Mughal, Ottoman, and Russian rose to power.

For the final, the students will be assessed on a stimulus based multiple choice exam and three short answer questions which mirrors the content objectives and the style in which the course is presented.

My students gain background information on the content objectives from a series of videos I made.  You can read about that process here.  The videos have freed time in the classroom to analyze documents and practice the writing. 

The students are reading and unpacking difficult documents like the ones pictured above. Two documents such as these can take entire period to analyze.  Each day they continually work towards mastery on these skills all while reinforcing their understanding of the content.   I am fortunate enough to have white board tables which makes it easy to read student samples and provide feedback. The students are able to ask individual questions about the documents and their writing. Since they write on the tables, I can easily provide feedback related directly their questions.  Furthermore, I can differentiate between poor writing skills or a gaps in their content knowledge.  Since they are writing so frequently, I am understanding their voice ways to fix it for each student.  After each day, I can pause the class to models of student work to emphasize a common mistake or praise progress.

The students are having to master the content knowledge to work through the documents and writing.  As seen in point C in the above sample, the student needs to draw more specific examples to prove their point.  It takes time to develop the ability to make claims about the past and defend them with historical examples that actually support the claim they made.  I am proud of the progress my students have made this semester! 

On Not Grading Notes

By Kim Miklusak

Formative assessment is nothing new; however, so many of us still grade notes and worksheets.  It can get exhausting, overwhelming even.  On top of all that, some people will say, it’s hard to “catch” cheaters.  But at the same time we argue that the practice of grading worksheets and notes helps students learn.  Or perhaps we argue that we need to hold them accountable.  We need to know that they’re learning.

When it comes down to it, though, if we assigned the same task to adult learners, we would allow them different ways of showing what they know.  Take for example chapter 2 of our textbook Everything’s an Argument.  If I were to take notes for this chapter, they would be 4 sentences long.  I get it.  There are big concepts in this chapter, no facts or details.  It’s the application of the theory that’s important, and that’s what we work on immediately after reading the chapter.  Yet up until last year I would “check-in” that students did notes as a completion grade to “show” that they were doing the reading.  Did that increase quiz scores?

This year I’m doing something different.  I’m marking in the “Notes” column of the quiz on Infinite Campus just the word “notes,” which indicates that the student showed me that they did notes either on paper or digitally.  This, I feel, provides me more information than a grade would have ever shown me.  First of all, fewer students, I believe, are going to “cheat” and copy someone else’s notes because it’s not for points in the first place.  I say to the students, “If you’re reading and not taking notes on this task and doing well, good for you.  If you’re reading and taking notes, and not doing well, we need to have a conversation.  If you’re not doing well and not doing notes, we need to have a conversation.”  And it has become just that: I was able to check in with students who did read and take notes.  We are able to talk about note taking skills and how to determine what’s important and compare note-taking theories across subject areas and texts in order to increase their comprehension of the text.

The next step for me is to do away with quizzes.  Why give a quiz on theories when it’s the application that we as teachers care about?  If students need to apply these concepts, and that’s my goal, then I need to assess that goal instead, not how they got there via theory quizzes.  I’m not there yet—that’s my next step: to make authentic application-based assessments that aren’t down-the-road essays.

Summer Reading 2016 Kick-Off!

By Kim Miklusak

Today we kicked off our Summer Reading 2016!

A few months ago students voted on a theme--Overcoming Obstacles.  The teacher Literacy Committee led by our API Megan Knight then went through various genres and selected several book options.  Students were invited either by various committees or randomly during lunch periods to do "speed dating" to help narrow down the choices to one or two from each genre.

Ultimately, seven books were chosen.  Literacy Committee members and students worked together to create promos for each of the books.  Students then responded to a Google Form in order to select the book they would like to read this summer.  Here are this year's promos!  As you can see we tried to focus on "If you liked..." recommendations.

1.  Positive by Paige Rawl
2.  I Beat the Odds  by Michael Oher
3.  The Book of the Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez
4.  We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
5.  The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson
6.  We Were Here by Matt de la Pena
7.  The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau

This year we are happy to announce two new exciting updates to our summer reading program.  First, each student at Elk Grove HS received a copy of the summer reading book of their choosing!  Additionally, we are going to host our first Million Minutes of Reading in May.  Each day in the month of May everyone in the building will "Stop, Drop, and Read."

As we did last year, many teachers are "sponsoring" a book for their team or club this year.  We hope to continue to build our committee of readers!  Also like last year we had a kick-off event where teachers stopped by to pick up their book selection, enjoy some cake, and take some photo booth photos with the books they chose.  Check out our tweets from the event at our hashtag #EGSR2016!

Book Recommendation for English and Reading Teachers

By Kim Miklusak

For a while now people have been recommending the books Book Love by Penny Kittle and The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller to me as I continue to work through the purpose of reading in our classrooms and, more specifically, how we implement independent reading.  For those of you in the same situation, I can't stress to you enough that you should pick up both books now and buy some copies for your friends.

What I appreciated about these books was how much they stress the disconnect between our goals of reading and what we implement in the classroom.  We frequently use punitive measures when what we really want is for students to improve in reading skills and--ultimately--appreciate reading as much as we do, so they can apply their skills to diverse and complex texts independently.  Both books supplied not only theory and anecdotes, but also clear strategies to implement immediately in the classroom.

My strongest takeaway from Book Love was the idea that we assign challenging texts to students whose skills may not allow the book to be accessible to them.  Yet at the same time we frequently undervalue independent reading.  Kittle argues that we should help build reading stamina in accessible books in addition to building in reading strategies in order to help students access books they may see in the classroom.  

One of my many takeaways from The Book Whisperer was the differentiation between the Developing Reader vs. the Dormant Reader vs. the Underground Reader.  The developing reader is one who we would more commonly refer to as a "struggling" reader, and Miller argues, much like Kittle does, that these students do not read as much as they need to in order to develop their skills--especially in remedial or test-taking focused programs.  The dormant readers by contrast are the ones who float through class "unmotivated and uninterested in reading," the ones who actually enjoy reading but the minimal demands of a classroom or the "reading hoops of a typical classroom" cause them to lose their interest and focus (28-29).  Finally, the underground readers are gifted ones who prefer their own reading to that done in school.  These are the readers who we as teachers frequently don't design lessons for because they have already surpassed most of their peers in this area.

In the end, both authors stressed two main points.  First, students must read: read more, read often, read books of their own choosing, and read books in their ability level!  This will help open doors to more complex texts.  And finally they stress that we as teachers have to share our love of reading with our students.  We need to talk about books with them, be honest with them about what we do and don't like in books, when we give up on a book and why, and how we find new books, etc.  Most adults aren't reading, so how else can we create this culture of readers if we ourselves don't model it for them!

It's not a waste of time--it's the foundation for everything we hope for in readers in our classrooms!

Building Background: IF IT WERE MY HOME

By Mark Heintz

This post is on the power of building background knowledge through the use of the website: If It Were My Home.

I stumbled across the website if it were my home while I was creating a pre-reading activity.  In my creation of the activity, I attempted to find a map that compared the size of Taiwan to the United States.  The website allows the user to select a home country, which can be changed, and another  country to compare.  Once the countries are selected, the website overlays the second country selected over the home country.  The user can even input a zip code for more precise comparison.  here is Taiwan over Chicago.

 

The website is very easy to use and provides a great visual for easy comparison. Furthermore, the website provides comparison data as if Taiwan or whatever country were your home.

The data can be expanded by clicking the drop-down menu on the right-hand side.  Another great note about the website is all of the information is cited! Most of the information on the site is pulled from the CIA World Factbook.  It is so easy to access a lot of information about a country and relates it to the users home country, easily building background knowledge.

At the bottom of the page, there is a brief overview of the country selected and the website provides a list of books for further exploration! 

With this website, it is so easy to build students background knowledge of a less familiar country. I continue to use this because of the great visuals and plethora of statistics.  

What Are You Reading?

By Kim Miklusak

Last week I posted on my other blog a survey I gave my students about why they are or are not reading at home for enjoyment or for assigned books for class.  One point I reflected on was how hard it is for those of us who are teachers and who enjoy reading to carve out time for ourselves to read for fun let alone to read education-related materials--and do we ask the same of our students?

Personally, I try to balance two texts at once: one lighthearted or easy to read like graphic novels or YA Lit and one more complicated, frequently heavy one.  For example, right now I'm reading This Star Won't Go Out and The New Jim Crow.  I've started dialoguing more with my peers about what I'm reading in The New Jim Crow (honestly one of the most startling and important books I've read).  I've also tried to talk to my students about what I'm reading for fun, including bringing in the books after I'm done reading them (the whole Unwind series!!).

Additionally, I've added a "currently reading" to the signature file of my emails.  I was surprised how much response I got back from peers about that: either asking about a book I'm reading or adding their own "currently reading."  I also saw a year or two ago an idea about having a dry erase board where you list your currently reading and "next up" and "suggestions" for students to see during class as well.  This has all been further inspired by participating in Good Reads with my students and peers--a game I am well late to, I realize, as it's an excellent community-building resource for avid and reluctant readers young and old.

So...what are YOU reading?

Graphic Novels: Teaching Shakespeare in Prep English

By Sandra Lee

It’s definitely challenging teaching a Shakespeare text to a class with such diverse needs and demands. The graphic novel (with its fascinating illustrations) helps students visualize the scenes in the story; since there are so many characters and plot twists, the illustrations help them understand the plot and tone. However, don ’t be fooled by the vivid images; the graphic novel follows the original Shakespearean language, which makes the text that much more complex.

Despite the barriers of Shakespeare’s language and a Middle Ages setting, my co-teacher and I try to create a means for students to apply self-monitoring skills as we read the graphic novel. Nonetheless, we did feel overwhelmed with how much we had to build a schema for our students; some of them had never even heard of Shakespeare. After immense pre-reading and previewing the text, students began to come up with questions, predictions, and comments that reveal their thinking and learning. They have two colored post-its: one is to answer the questions we ask during each scene and the other is used for their own thoughts and observations.

My favorite comment is when a student stated, “Macbeth is so annoying.” Immediately, I became ready to explain once again the importance of reading the story, but then she continued by saying, “He keeps changing his mind. Like one minute he feels guilty, and the next minute he doesn’t.” This comment was a game-changer. The fact that a student was able to make a critical comment with his/her own evaluations about the character made us feel like there was value in this process.

We try to engage our students even if the language itself is unattainable to them. In the end, we are finding that students are still working on the literacy skills that are important and that they critically thinking about the text.

Here are some examples of their work:

 




For an additional blog post about teaching Shakespeare through standards-based learning, check out this post!

To Read or Not to Read? Can Shakespeare fit in a Standards-Based English Curriculum?

By Kristen Guth

Recently I have been involved in a lot of conversations about Standards-Based Grading and what that looks like in an English class. These meaningful conversations have also forced me to ask myself a lot of difficult questions. If I am working to implement SBG, does that imply that I should only be teaching skills and not the content? Is the text we are selecting an appropriate vehicle for helping students access, learn, and master the skills? Can the average, non-AP student practice and demonstrate mastery of reading skills while reading Shakespeare?

In having these conversations with colleagues and friends, I have discovered that many schools have removed Shakespeare from their English courses, at least at the regular level. This realization makes me incredibly sad for those students and those teachers. Not only will those students be missing out on the cultural relevancy of Shakespeare’s works, but they are also missing an amazing opportunity to see that reading skills are the necessary key to unlocking and appreciating the true meaning of a text.

We are currently reading Macbeth in my Sophomore World Literature & Composition classes, and I believe that it has been an amazing text to use for a skills-based curriculum. Because the text is difficult and the comprehension does not come easy, students are forced to closely analyze the language, literary devices, word choice, themes, etc. in order to have any real understanding of the play. 

One of my colleagues, Matt Snow, shared with me an entirely skills-based scene analysis activity that he uses at the honors level. Students are required to read for conflict, sequence of events, cause and effect, key quotes, literary terms, symbols, themes, inferences, and predictions. The first time I showed it to my regular students, they were pretty scared. Even though we had practiced all of these skills with other texts, they thought there was no way they could possibly be successful when the same practice was applied to such a difficult text. I am not going to lie, it was not easy for them. I had to do a lot of facilitating and guiding the first time through, but I have gradually been able to pull away and put all of the responsibility on the kids. They really had to work together with their groups and grind through some of the tougher questions, but it was amazing to watch. By repeating this practice with several parts of the play, their mastery of the skills has grown in conjunction with their mastery of the content.

I have rarely seen students as proud of their work as they were with this skills-based activity, and it provided me with some really clear formative feedback on their reading skills. More importantly, it gave my students such a great sense of accomplishment knowing that they could use their reading skills to tackle the subtleties, nuances, and deeper meanings of a text that they could not even begin to comprehend on the first read. There is a reason that Shakespeare has been read in English classes for so long, and I think his plays definitely still have a place in a Standards-Based Grading curriculum. 

Student Samples: 

       

 









For an additional blog post about teaching Shakespeare through graphic novels, check out this post!

Comprehensible input for everyone

by Kirsten Fletcher

What resources do you use in your classroom? Are they at the appropriate level for your students? If not, how can you modify your instruction so that all students can master content?  Reading Mark Heintz's blog post on ditching the textbook yesterday made me think of the principle of comprehensible input.

http://languageeducation.pbworks.com/w/page/60937285/Comprensible%20Input

In world language instruction, comprehensible input is a key concept based on the research of Stephen Krashen. It basically states that students learn best when the language they hear is just above their current level of comprehension. In other words, they are given just enough new information to challenge them to build upon their background knowledge, but not so much that they become discouraged and give up.


There is definitely more to Stephen Krashen's hypothesis, but my focus here is on how to make all learning comprehensible to students. Why do we continue to assign reading passages to students that are so far above their ability level? If the material is too easy, they gain nothing. The same is true if it is too difficult; they can not access the content and therefore can not link it to prior knowledge. Of course, we can try to bridge the gap by providing visuals, graphic organizers, examples, etc. However, it might be worth our time to re-evaluate the input itself.

http://mslizethbrown.weebly.com/tangibles.html

I recently attended the ICTFL (Illinois Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) conference where I participated in a session led by Emily Walk. She taught strategies for presenting new information through comprehensible input. While many of the tips were specific to language, here are some suggestions from that session that are universal. Many of these are not new, but they are good reminders of how to make content more comprehensible to our students. Hopefully you'll find these useful:

• Always make content meaningful and relevant.
• Always incorporate multiple learning modes in direct instruction (visual, audio, kinesthetic).
• Instead of memorizing vocab lists, have students order and/or rank concepts and justify their reasoning.
• Instead of starting with the vocab list and then giving fill-in activities, start with vocabulary embedded in reading. An easy way to do this is to fill in those blanks for students to see if they can understand terms from context before even studying them.
• Conduct class surveys about concepts and have students create graphs to explain / summarize.
• Break up sentences into two parts where students match the first half with the second half (i.e. cause - effect).
• Before fill-ins, try matching opposites, true/false or logical/illogical exercises.
• Have students illustrate concepts they have read.
• Pick a side: have students take a stand by moving to one side of the room or the other.

Shifting the Focus of Class: which skills do we teach to which students?

By Kim Miklusak

Last year I read this blog post by Kylene Beers.  I definitely recommend taking a moment to read and reflect upon it.  In it she highlights the difference between "who is taught what?"--that is, what reading skills do we teach to "struggling" vs. "highly skilled" readers.  Not surprisingly, most teachers report that they focus on paraphrasing and comprehension with "struggling readers," yet author's purpose and logical inferences with "highly skilled readers."  While she specifically focuses on the term "readers," I believe the skill difference she highlights crosses subject areas.  See the two charts here.

I've been reflecting upon this difference in my own English class this year as we continue to revise our curriculum at the regular and AP levels and as we have interdisciplinary conversations in our school.  Our "struggling readers" are those who would thrive on these higher level conversations.  Too often (and I am grossly overgeneralizing here--obviously not everyone is like this) we bemoan the completion rate of tasks and passing rate at the regular level.  Students are bored--of course they are!  We have heard on Twitter and elsewhere, "Would you want to be a student in your own class?"  Would we be motivated to read if we focused only on vocabulary and paraphrasing?  Even we as teachers have "more fun" in our engaging classes.

How then do we have struggling readers complete the comprehension portion of activities, so they are able to move on to the higher level skills and the engaging activities?  One way I am trying to work on that this year is by moving toward a system that I discussed at length with Mark Heintz in our history department and have seen Linda Ashida do in her Spanish classes: make the comprehension a requirement instead of a grade.

Students cannot participate in the higher level portion until they complete the foundational activities.  First we must ask ourselves: are the tasks I am having students do required to help them understand the text?  Do they practice skills that we could practice in other ways?  Or are they filler?  Instead have the bulk of class time be the engaging portion, and more students will want to do the activities to move along. 

Easier said then done, perhaps. Foremost, it is easier in a less linear course like English, History, or foreign language.  Next this requires giving up some control in your class: large group work and discussions are easy for the teacher, and they are easy for the student.  But do we know where each student is in terms of skills and content?  Shifting more easily between required work, large group work, and individual work allows teachers more flexibility in shifting the learning into the students' hands.  In a large group there are students who are not participating; those same students may not be following along in small and individual work, but in this case we know who they are, where they are, and we can remediate to help move them along.  And, ideally, the motivation is beyond the grade to move more students forward.

I will post more again another time on the actual practice of this once we are moving through our next full unit, and I will provide screen shots and student samples to let you know how it's going!  Right now it's slightly more theory than practice!

Using Flipboard for reading in the classroom

by Kirsten Fletcher

I've had a lot of conversations with staff members recently about how to get students reading in the content area. One of the ideas that came up was to let students explore Flipboard.

Flipboard is a great app to encourage reading because students can search multiple sources for articles on a particular topic. For example, if you want your students to read something about technology, they can search under that tab and browse snapshots of articles (and sometimes videos) from a variety of magazines, newspapers and websites. If a student wants to read more, there is a link that takes them to the full original article. It is also possible to follow others' boards or to tweet links directly from the app.

If students create an account, they can select the topics that most interest them so that those come up first. As a teacher, you could require them to include your subject in those preferences (economy, recipes, fashion, art, etc.) Searching by topic is a time saver and may bring students to resources they might not find by searching through Google. One teacher at our school is using this app to encourage his students to read about current events.

As a language teacher, my favorite feature is that students can choose their International Content Guide in preferences. I have my French students set it to France so that their menu and all related articles and videos pop up in French. This way they have exposure to authentic written and spoken sources.

Have any other engaging ways to get students interested in reading? We'd love to hear from you in the Collab Lab!

Library Books on Your iPad!

By Kim Miklusak

As a disclaimer, I've only started playing around with the OverDrive App this past week.  There are so many things I'm still discovering, but it's such an easy app, and it will be great for our Summer Reading books (#EGSR2015) and for reading more throughout the year, so I wanted to share!

OverDrive is a free app that allows you to access books, audio books, and videos from your local library.  It's available for iPhone and iPad (as well as other formats).  It's simple to sign up for an account.  Then you just add your local library or libraries.  In our case, when students search Elk Grove High School, our district libraries come up.  You can check out books using your library card number or ID depending on the library.

The books are searchable by level, by topic, by recommendations, etc.  You can even search for more than one category at once to narrow down your choices.  There's also an extensive section for recommendations based on books you like or have read.  Once you find a book, it's as simple as clicking "borrow" and "download."  Then the books are listed on your bookshelf to read whenever you want.  They can be downloaded or read off the web browser.  If your book is on hold, you just click "hold," and you will receive an email telling you when it's available.  Renewal is simple, too!  Either click "renew" when you receive your 3-day notice.  When you are finished, you click "return book," and it disappears from your bookshelf.  The app also tells you how many more days you have left before your book "expires."  No worries about overdue fees!

Do you have any experiences with OverDrive that you can share?  Leave them in the comments below!

Student Feedback and Previewing

By Mark Heintz

The 2014-2015 school year focused on literacy and building background knowledge before learning.  In the past few weeks, I allocated considerable amount of class time dedicated to pre-reading.  The objective of the lesson was stated and the skills I hoped they acquire.

To start the lesson, I created a fact cube with words from the up coming reading.  I cut the nine squares and put the students into pairs.  I gave the students seven minutes to attempt the cube.  It was great to see them piece the puzzle together.  The students were so engaged! The students struggled, but I was able to guide them without telling them the answers.  When the students finished, they left the cube on their desks so they would have access to the definitions while reading.

Next, I had the students pick two of the words and predict what the reading will be about.  Here are two examples.  

It was so powerful!  The students received positive praise for their efforts.  When I picked these two students to display their work over AppleTV, they were taken aback by how right they were and the praise I gave them and their fellow students.  

The best part was there wasn't a wrong answer in this process.  The examples above show how students were able to predict what the reading was about.  Even if a student was wrong in their prediction, they were connecting the words and thinking in the process! The reading was short but dense.  As they read, they so much to fall back on because their learning had been activated and received feedback on their understandings of the definitions and predictions.  

Timelines Apps & Student Engagement

By Kim Miklusak

Traditionally I have had my AP English Language students create a timeline for the plot of Slaughterhouse-Five.  The book is written out of chronological order as the main character, Billy, is "unstuck" in time.  Students often struggle with this fact; not only do they frequently have difficulty seeing the events in order, but they also have difficulty partnering up events to analyze why Kurt Vonnegut would structure his novel this way.  After the students brainstormed their timelines, we would create one master timeline on the board and use it as a jumping off point for broader discussions and clarifications.

I wanted to try this same technique on the iPad; however, I was debating with myself whether this was simply a matter of substitution of iPad over paper.  I ultimately decided to go ahead with it and see what else I could do with it.  What I ended up finding is that the individual yet public nature of the assignment helped students to more personally connect with the ultimate goals.

On the suggestion of my coworker Kristen Guth, I had my students download the RWT Timeline app.  It is free and very easy to use; I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to work with timelines in class.  Students could organize their timeline by event, add short and long descriptions, and add pictures if they wanted.   It was interesting to hear students work through the timeline with their partners.  They engaged in debates on placement of events, which led to them making individual connections between relationships.

Student sample

In the end I had students upload their timeline into a Schoology Media Album, so everyone in class could review them.  We then shared them on the screen and discussed the differences between one timeline and another.  While I can't claim that it's completely transforming through technology, I'm still happy with the way it turned out and the increase in individual student engagement.

Historical Twitter Handles?

By Mark Heintz

The strategy below is a post reading strategy that is easy to implement and gets a lot out of the students.  I have posted about how my history classes usually begin with some sort of warm up relating to documents.  Sometimes they are pictures, but usually they are a reading.  You can read more about them here.

Recently, my students read a few short paragraphs on the British East India Company. I wanted to see how much my students understood from the reading.  At the end of the reading they were asked to create a twitter handle about the document and a tweet that showcased their understanding of the passage.  This was the first time I used this strategy and I wasn't sure how it would go.  But it turned out to be pretty great. Some of the examples were pretty hilarious or very informative.

 The great thing about this strategy was the effort and thought the students put into the task.  They were reading the passage over and over again to come up with something good.  As I walked around the class, I saw students go through several drafts to get to one that was worth sharing!  Several drafts! It was suppose to be a simple post reading exercise, but ended up being an exercise in mental gymnastic that students really cared about.  At the end, some examples were shared over AppleTV.   Give it a try yourself, and let me know how it goes!

Activate Prior Knowledge or Build Background Knowledge

By Mark Heintz

In history, students typically do not have a lot of direct background knowledge on a subject.  One way to build background knowledge or activate any prior knowledge in a quick in easy way is through picture.  I try to put more pictures into the curriculum because they make students think.  Anytime I can do that, I put one in the win category.  For this picture analysis, I used two different forms of art, Ottoman miniatures, and Aztec codices.  These two forms of art are on the AP World curriculum framework.  I mean…I did my dissertation on the cultural comparisons between Aztec codices and Ottoman miniatures. 

Anyway, I have students list everything they see in the pictures.  It really is that easy.  Also, it is a great starting point for picture analysis. The students come up with great observations simply by looking at the photos.  From the pictures below, the one on the left, the students saw soldiers with guns.  Which is great, because they either made the connection to prior learning about Janissaries or they then have that image in their mind when they read about Janissaries later in the period.

The pictures were a pre reading strategy.  The pictures gave students an image in their mind when they read about Aztecs and the Ottomans of which they typically have little prior knowledge.  These images were a great reference point when details come up in the reading.

The student listed what they saw under the picture and then listed what the whole class listed on the right hand side of the picture.  In this case, the iPad was a great medium for the students because they can see the pictures in color and can zoom in on specific parts of the images.

Determining Main Ideas in a Reading Passage

I start my AP World History class almost every day with a warm up.  I like the routine of starting off class with the students diving right into content and thinking.  Also, they know what to do at the beginning of class, which helps them start right away.  Before every student had an iPad, I left the warm ups at the door.  Each student picked the paper up as they entered the room, and the instructions were always on the sheet.  Now that each student has an iPad, they download it through the LMS I use, Schoology. 

Most of the time the warm up is a reading that builds background knowledge or addresses an AP theme that is, for a lack of better way to say it, random.  The warm ups are always short, something they can read or complete in less than a few minutes.  Then they can share with another student.  Finally, we report out as a class and then I answer any questions the students might have. The whole process takes from five to ten minutes.

I have a variety of strategies I use depending on what skill I would like to focus on that day.  Also, the variety helps keep the students interested in doing them almost every day. In this case, I used the deletion summary reading strategy.  I used this strategy because students often have a trouble determining what is important or not.  This is crucial when reading non-fiction material.  Furthermore, students will need this skill in any profession, as they will need to be able to sift through material quickly and efficiently in almost any profession.   

 I always give the students a clearly defined purpose when they read.  When using the deletion summary strategy, students cross out everything that does not answer the question or is aligned to the purpose. At the end, I have the students summarize the remaining information. 

Seeing what students delete or keep is very revealing. At first, they either delete or keep everything.  It takes several attempts for students to understand what is important. It takes time to develop that skill when reading unfamiliar non-fiction material.  To help the students, I walk through the process with the class.  After reading each line, I ask what part of the line is essential or directly related to the objective.  Then, we cross out everything we did not say.  As we do this more frequently, I will have several students share over AppleTV their attempts.